hunter: that sales tax counts for about a third of the revenue of the department right now. franklin: we got 75% of the voters to agree to tax themselves so that their children and their children's children could have clean water because we're investing in it now. hunter: there were no alternatives. the infrastructure was in dire straits. a lot of people didn't want to believe it had to be done, but it had to be done. what came out of those lawsuits by the upper chattahoochee river keeper were two consent decrees, focused on overflows. the intent is, city of atlanta, you need to keep the flows in the pipe. narrator: with the help of the funding the city raised, atlanta has been implementing an asset management plan that evaluates and addresses their infrastructure issues. hunter: it's a continuum. at one end, you have your regular maintenance that you do every day on the system, and at the other end, long-term planning so that every year we're repairing, replacing the right things, and we don't have to do it all at once, which is, quite frankly, what we're having to do in at